L. Ian MacDonald: Historic inaugural speech from Obama

L. Ian MacDonald, Special to The Gazette01.23.2013

L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Inside Policy, the magazine of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

U.S. President Barack Obama pauses as he speaks during a memorial service for the victims and relatives of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 16, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut.Mandel Ngan
/ AFP/Getty Images

MONTREAL — It is too soon to say whether Barack Obama’s second inaugural address ranks up there with John F. Kennedy’s in 1961 and Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1933, to say nothing of Abraham Lincoln’s in 1861 and 1865.

But it was a major-league speech, one that compares very well with great presidential inaugurals.

Kennedy’s “Ask Not” speech came at the height of the Cold War, while Roosevelt told Americans during the Great Depression that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Lincoln’s two inaugurals were the bookends of the U.S. Civil War. His second inaugural, “with malice toward none,” was a model of brevity, only four paragraphs long.

It wasn’t just the content that made those speeches historic, but also the context.

Obama’s second inaugural on Monday was rhetorically rich in content, and he boldly proposed the context of a liberal agenda for his second term. Remember the candidate of hope and change? He was back.

The text was elegant, the delivery was eloquent — lifted off the page, and having nothing to do with the Teleprompter.

There are two kinds of speeches, the ones written by a committee that put audiences to sleep, and the ones in which the speaker works with a single writer who captures his voice, such as JFK and Ted Sorensen in 1961. This was definitely in the second category.

There were two refrains, “We, the people,” recalling America’s revolutionary beginnings, and “our journey is not complete,” as the frame of Obama’s agenda. It’s the second refrain that may someday be remembered as Obama’s “Ask Not” moment.

It remains to be seen how much of his agenda he can push through a gridlocked Congress, just back from staring into the abyss of the “fiscal cliff.” But having led from the rear during most of his first term, Obama made it clear he would be leading from the front in his second term, using the unique power of his office that Theodore Roosevelt termed the “bully pulpit.”

In the “We, the people” part of the speech, Obama made two points, on income inequality and entitlements. As he said: “Our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.”

He went on: “We, the people still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. ... We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.”

But then he transitioned to “posterity” on climate change, “knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

He added: “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path toward sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist transition, we must lead it.”

This was the unintentional Canadian moment, possibly an ominous one for the prospect of the Keystone XL pipeline being built from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Environmental activists oppose the project on the grounds that bitumen from the Canadian oilsands will add to global warming. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Obama has also bought into the argument that major weather events are driven by climate change.

It remains to be seen what Obama will do about emissions from coal-fired power stations in the U.S. — but that’s another conversation, about the coal lobby in Washington. It is, as Al Gore might say, an inconvenient truth.

And then, on Martin Luther King Day and 50 years after King’s famous “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Obama invoked “a King” who proclaimed that “our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.”

King’s message was racial equality, while Obama was speaking of gender equality in the broadest sense of the term: “Our journey is not complete,” he declared, “until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law.”

And then, on the sensitive issue of immigration: “Our journey is not complete until we find a way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity.”

Finally, on gun control: “Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.”

Newtown may not have changed the course of Obama’s presidency, but it has clearly changed him. Where he used to do a job, he now understands his larger role.

L. Ian MacDonald was chief speech writer to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and later head of the public affairs division at the Canadian Embassy in Washington.

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